A large crowd of journalists from media outlets around the world gathered June 12 in Jerusalem for the release of the International Report on the Danger of a Nuclear, Genocidal and Rights-Violating Iran: The Responsibility to Prevent Petition.
Irwin Cotler
The 200-page document – said to be the most comprehensive and up-to-date account of the Iranian threat – along with an 18-point road map for action, has been signed by more than 100 scholars, jurists, former government leaders, parliamentarians and Iranian activists who comprise the “Responsibility to Prevent” Coalition.
It aims to pressure the international community into taking “smart sanctions” against Iran, and compel both the United States and the United Nations Security Council to actually implement the resolutions they have passed.
The petition was presented by Canadian Liberal MP and former justice minister Irwin Cotler, the coalition’s chair, for whom Israel is one of six stops on an international advocacy tour that includes meetings with governments and press in North America, Britain, Australia, Ethiopia and Argentina.
He presented the petition along with local signatories such as former MK Amnon Rubenstein; the former president of the Israeli Supreme Court, Meir Shamgar, and founder and chair of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring group, Bassam Eid, who is a vocal opponent of Iran for its ties with Hamas and its involvement in continued repression of the Palestinian people.
The report accuses the Iranian Revolutionary Guard of illegal nuclear proliferation, state-sponsored international terrorism (with Hezbollah and Hamas on their list of beneficiaries), state-sponsored incitement to genocide (with open calls for the destruction of Israel), and massive domestic human rights violations perpetrated against women and gays, as well as members of labor unions and religious and ethnic minorities.
“We are witnessing in [President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad’s Iran the toxic convergence of four distinct, yet interrelated, dangers,” Cotler said. “And yet, the international community has remained largely silent.”
Cotler said that despite being bound by international legal obligations – including the Genocide Convention – both the UN Security Council in its June 9 resolution and the U.S. Treasury in its June 16 initiatives, as well as Congressional legislation signed into law July 1, deal almost exclusively with Iran’s nuclear threat and don’t address the issues of terrorist funding, incitement to genocide and human rights violations.
“Emphasis has been on the nuclear threat, and this runs the risk of ignoring, if not sanitizing the other three major threats posed by Iran,” says Cotler. “We fully support [the new U.S. legislation] but it doesn’t go far enough in addressing the four-fold threat.”
Another problem is that although the UN and United States have passed some sanctions, they’re not being enforced. The latest UN resolution was the fourth such decree regarding the Iranian nuclear threat. “We welcome this [latest] resolution, but the three before were honoured more in the breach than in the observance,” Cotler said.
Similarly, although a growing number of U.S. oil companies and trading houses have stopped doing business with Iran, relations do continue. According to Cotler, during the last decade, the U.S. government provided $107 billion in contracts and assistance to firms trading with Iran, including more than $15 billion to firms supporting the petroleum and energy sector.
“It’s not enough to enact sanctions. You have to enforce them,” he said.
Cotler cited another problem with existing sanctions: they’re only economic in nature. “Sanctions have to be multi-layered,” he said. “It is just as important to have economic sanctions as it is to have political, diplomatic and juridical ones.”
Despite his criticisms of the United States, he said it has gone much further than any other country. Despite an EU call to action on June 17, the European Union hasn’t adopted any resolutions against Iran, nor have any European countries. On the contrary: according to Cotler, while Austria’s trade with every other country have decreased over the past year, its trade with Iran has gone up, and German-Iranian trade is worth $6 billion per year with Iran.
Earlier this month, German public television in Berlin played host to Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) director Ezzatollah Zarghami, who allegedly has ties to the Revolutionary Guard, and he accused CNN and the BBC of faking the footage of activist Neda Agha Soltan’s death during the 2009 Iranian election protests.
“How does Germany roll out the red carpet for this person who controls Iran’s broadcasting, and who is part of the propaganda of hate? It’s astonishing. Where is the outrage? Why are states not speaking out against these human rights violators?” Cotler asked.
“It’s not enough for the U.S. to enact sanctions and enforce them. We need multilateral sanctions. The European Union and the EU states have to join in the sanctions, as well as Japan.”
Cotler also called on human rights groups to speak out against Iran. “They tend to go after the democracies but not after dictatorships. They will go after wiretapping but not state-sanctioned incitement to genocide,” he said. “Where is the human rights community? Why aren’t they doing more to hold Iran to account?”
Cotler said Canadian sanctions against Iran have also so far only centred on the nuclear threat and have not involved Iran’s other breaches of international law. Cotler said he’d like to see Canada invoke its Special Economic Measures Act (SEMA) against Iran, a piece of legislation that calls for extreme sanctions in cases of threat to international peace and security. It was last applied to Burma and Zimbabwe.
If the international community will unite and bring sanctions against the Revolutionary Guard, and bring it to the International Criminal Court, it may weaken it enough to give the country’s democratic Green movement an opportunity to ascend, Cotler said. “Our hope is that [these sanctions] will move us towards democratization in Iran.”
The time to act is now, he added. “No one can say we didn’t know what was going on in Rwanda or Darfur. In these cases, the international community intervened after the horrors already occurred,” Cotler said. “With Iran, we have an opportunity and a responsibility. This is a wake-up call to the international community. We need comprehensive international sanctions that will be enforced, in order to have an impact.”
